11 The Teashop on the Corner (2 page)

‘The Lord bless-cl Martin Pride, the Lord maketh-cl his face to cl-shine upon him and give him peace-cl. Amen.’

There was an echoed chorus of Amens.

‘I now invite Carla to lead you to cl-say your goodbyes-cl to Martin before he leaves-cl us to join his Lord in eternal peace-cl,’ said the Reverend Duckworth, holding out his arm
towards her to head up the final acknowledgement.

Carla pulled herself wearily up from the pew. She was totally distraught and felt twice as old as her thirty-four years. She was clinging on to her long-stemmed red rose as if it was the only
thing keeping her on her feet. She walked slowly over to the coffin and laid the rose gently on top of it.

‘Goodbye, Martin. Goodbye, my love.’

Then it all happened so quickly. Before anyone else could stand, a tall, grim-faced woman in a black coat and high red heels flounced forwards, picked up Carla’s rose, threw it on the
floor and placed her own red rose on the coffin instead. It had a head the size of a football. There was a churchful of gasps as Carla turned to her with shocked confusion and both women locked
eyes.

‘What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?’ Carla asked.

‘I’m Martin’s wife,’ the woman in the red shoes replied. ‘Or should I say “widow” now.’

‘Mrs Williams, I am on my knees. Just one more week, please. I am begging you.’

Will Linton was indeed on his knees as he pleaded with Mrs Cecilia Williams from the West Yorkshire Bank. He was desperately playing for time, even though he suspected an extra week
wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. He had exhausted every avenue which might have saved his company from closing and his workforce from the dole. The bank had been more than fair,
really. They’d given him two extensions already and no miracle had occurred to save him, however hard he had prayed for one. His accountant had warned him that they wouldn’t listen and
it was time to give up and throw in the towel, but Will felt duty-bound to try to give it everything he had.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Linton,’ said Mrs Williams, her voice firm but not unkind. ‘We can’t.’

She was probably a good woman who was nice to animals, a mother, a wife, a convivial host at dinner parties, but at work her job was to know when to say, ‘No. It’s the
end.’

Will opened his mouth to remonstrate, but he knew it was over. He could hear faint strains of Simon and Garfunkel in the back of his mind.
Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart.
This
Cecilia had also broken his balls. But he didn’t blame her – the fault was entirely his.

The massive Phillips and Son Developments had gone into receivership and in turn had taken down Yorkshire Stone Homes who, in turn, had taken down Linton Roofing, whose director had been idiot
enough to put all his eggs in the Yorkshire Stone Homes basket. A chain of businesses had toppled like dominos, but this was no innocent child’s game. Men were going to be out of work –
good men with families and mortgages. He’d intended to retire in ten years max, when he was forty-eight. Throwing his all in with Yorkshire Stone Homes should have set Will up for life. It
was a no-brainer whether or not to trust them – they had been a rock solid and highly profitable business for over fifty years. Oh, the irony.

‘Thank you, Mrs Williams, for all you’ve done. I appreciate it,’ he said, his throat as dry as one of the bags of cement in his builders’ yard.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, and sounded it. ‘I’ll send you a letter confirming our conversation and advising of the next steps to be taken.’

He didn’t say any more before putting the phone back on the cradle. He didn’t know what those next steps would consist of. He couldn’t handle even thinking about them just yet.
He had a big wall inside his head, holding back the questions, the fears, the confusion, the shame. It was going to crumble at any moment, but until it did, he would savour the blankness.

He heard the front door open and close and smelt his wife Nicole before he saw her as she swept in on a wave of her perfume, something sickly and sweet and reminiscent of chocolate limes, which
she used as liberally as if she were crop-spraying. He hated that smell, not that he had ever told her that.

She had shopping bags in her hands, of course. He wouldn’t have recognised her had she not had bags in her hands. And all the bags had names on them: Biba, Karen Millen, Chanel. Actually,
he didn’t recognise her at all for a moment – the last time he had seen her she’d had short blonde hair, now she looked like bleedin’ Rapunzel.

‘So, what did they say?’ she asked. There was no softness in her voice. ‘I’m gathering by you kneeling on the floor that it isn’t good news.’

Nicole had dropped the bags now and was standing with her arms crossed, her artificially inflated lips attempting to pucker.

‘It’s the end,’ he said, turning his face towards her. He wanted her to stride up to him, put her arms around him, tell him that it was all right and they’d weather it.
Instead she said, ‘Fuck.’ And looked furious.

‘We’ve lost the lot, love.’ He shrugged and gave a humourless dry chuckle.

Nicole’s head jerked. ‘Don’t “love” me.’

She’d had hair extensions put in and had been in the hairdressers’ all day. It was two hundred pounds a pop to have a squirt of shampoo at Mr Corleone’s in Sheffield –
especially as Nicole always had the head stylist, the don himself: so with that in mind, what had those extensions cost? And God knows how much she’d spent shopping. Then again, daddy cleared
her Visa bill every month. She was a married woman of thirty-two and yet daddy still gave her pocket money, although Nicole didn’t know that Will knew that.

‘I’ll get it back. Everything,’ said Will. ‘I might have lost it now, but I’ll bounce back stronger than ever. If I let them take the lot – the house, the
car, the company, clear the accounts, I can avoid bankruptcy. I can start again.’

Nicole didn’t say a thing in response. She just flicked her new hair over her shoulder. The irony didn’t bypass Will that at least one of them had been successful in getting some
extensions today.

‘You’ll be living in a mansion this time next year,’ he said, trying to coax a smile out of her. ‘It’ll make this place look like a pig-sty.’

Her expression didn’t falter.

‘It’s the end of Linton Roofing. There’s nothing I can do.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. There has to be something.’

Ridiculous? She didn’t know the meaning of the word. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept properly, without waking up in a sweat of panic. Or eaten a meal that he
didn’t want to throw up again. His anxiety levels were off the scale: he’d lost two stone in weight, he got dizzy if he climbed past the fifth rung of a ladder, and yet his darling
missus was always out sitting under a dryer, shopping in House of bloody Fraser, having someone put false nails on the tips of her fingers or being wrapped in seaweed as if she hadn’t a care
in the world. That was ridiculous.

‘I’ve tried everything, darling,’ he said, which was a slight lie, as there was one thing he hadn’t attempted and that was asking Nicole’s father for a loan. But
his pride was saved from going down that route because he knew that Barnaby Whitlaw would have burnt his money note by note in a barbecue before he lent it to a nouveau-riche vulgar type like his
son-in-law.

‘I’ll get it all back, love, I promise,’ he said again.

Nicole didn’t gratify him with a reply. She merely snatched up her carrier bags and teetered upstairs to her dressing room on her red-soled Christian Louboutins.

The Reverend Duckworth closed the vestry door behind him, leaving the two women in there as he went back into the church to ask the congregation to bear with them. In his forty
years as a reverend, he had come across some bizarre things; but this was a first, even for him. He’d had ex-partners burst in on weddings intent on revenge, even a scrap at a christening
over the alleged paternity of a child, but never a double wife showdown at a funeral.

Inside the vestry, Carla could only think: ‘People will be waiting for the buffet.’ Her mind could deal with that sort of problem. It couldn’t deal with this woman standing in
front of her with her big black buttoned-up swing coat and her enormous brimmed hat. She was older than Carla, she guessed, by about ten years, and her clothes would have cost Carla six
months’ wages at least; but they did little to disguise a brassiness that manifested itself in the woman’s hard face and her fag-ravaged voice.

‘I’m gathering you didn’t know anything about me then,’ the woman said, pulling off her black shiny gloves one long finger at a time, a ladylike, delicate gesture which
contrasted with her aggressive cocky stance.

Carla opened her mouth to say that no, she hadn’t a clue, but nothing came out. She wanted to cry but her eyes were as dry as her throat, tears frozen by shock.

‘Allow me to introduce myself then. I’m Julie. Julie Pride. And I have been for thirty years. Mrs Martin Pride, to be exact.’

Carla’s legs started to tremble as if someone had replaced her usually sturdy pins with Bambi’s new-born fawn ones. She let herself fall onto a chair next to the large rectangular
wooden table that formed the centrepiece of the room. Could this day become any more of a pantomime? Was Widow Twanky going to turn up in a minute and join the two Widow Prides?

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ said Carla. She wasn’t so much gobsmacked as felled. ‘You can’t be married to Martin. I would have known. I’ve been
married to him—’ she stalled momentarily, to remember the church ceremony in which she had married him in a white dress in front of the very altar where his coffin now stood. A legal
ceremony, with all the ‘i’s dotted and the ‘t’s crossed: register signed, vows recited, no just impediments exposed . . . She took a deep breath and continued,
‘—married to him for ten years.’

‘No you haven’t,’ snapped Julie, rolling up the gloves and stuffing them in the stiff black handbag she was carrying. It had a flashy gold double-C Chanel logo on the front.
‘You only think you have. We split up soon after we were married; but we never divorced. Didn’t have the money at the time, then I suppose we both just forgot.’

Forgot?
thought Carla. You forgot to post a letter, you forgot to buy milk at the shop – you didn’t
forget to divorce.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ sniffed Julie, snapping the clasp shut on her bag. ‘Forgetting to divorce is an odd one. I don’t think either of us could be arsed,
if I’m being honest. He slipped from my mind until I saw him a year ago in Leeds. Could have knocked me down with a feather. It was like a thunderbolt hitting us both from above. You read
about these things happening in women’s mags, but you never believe they could happen to you. Until it did. We went for a coffee and found the old spark reignited. Who would have
thought?’ And she laughed to herself as if the memory had tickled her.

Carla shook her head. Was she hearing all this correctly? Her husband had been carrying on with another woman . . .
his real wife
. . . for a year behind her back? When the hell did he
have the time? Or the ability? He’d puffed when he got the milk out of the fridge.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Carla, her head full of so many questions that were going to burst out of her eardrums any minute, fly across the room and shatter the stained glass
window picture of Jesus having his feet washed. ‘When did he see you?’

‘He spent every weekday with me, of course,’ said Julie, patting the back of her heavily lacquered yellow hair. ‘I was frankly glad to have a rest at the weekends.’

‘A rest?’

‘From the sex.’

‘The sex?’

Carla was totally bewildered now. They could not be talking about the same man. Martin was always too tired. She could count on the fingers of one hand, minus the thumb, the number of times that
she and Martin had had sex in the last year or so.

‘I’m not daft,’ said Julie, inspecting her tart-red nail varnish. ‘He promised me he wouldn’t have sex with you after we became a couple again but I know what he
was like. Very healthy appetite in that area, so I promised myself I wouldn’t get upset about it. He was a bloke with needs after all.’ She pulled her lips back from her teeth and Carla
saw how white and perfect they were. Thousands of pounds worth of cosmetic dentistry of which any Osmond would have been proud.

‘Are you sure you have the right Martin Pride?’ said Carla. ‘I don’t recognise this man you’re talking about.’

‘Martin Ronald Pride. Birthday: thirteenth of January.’

‘Works as a sales rep for—’

‘He didn’t work,’ Julie interrupted. ‘At least he didn’t after the lottery win.’

Carla’s brain went into spasm. ‘Wha-at?’

Julie’s black-tattooed eyebrows rose and a slow smirk spread across her lips. ‘Oh, he didn’t tell you about that either?’

Carla’s head fell into her hands. She was surprised she had a head left as it felt in danger of exploding at any moment.

‘Me and Martin won just short of a million on the lottery nine months ago,’ said Julie with smarmy satisfaction. ‘He told Suggs to stick their job up their arse on the same
day.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t get any ideas. It’s all in my name.’

Carla’s head snapped up.

‘But he went off to work every Monday and rang me every night from a hotel.’

Julie laughed. ‘He might have left you on a Monday morning, love, but he certainly didn’t ring you from any hotel.’

Carla covered her eyes with her hands to shut out the light, shut out everything around her whilst she tried to make sense of this. Martin wasn’t that duplicitous. Living that sort of
double life took a level of cunning and cleverness that Martin couldn’t have aspired to: he was far too simple a creature. Every Monday morning, Martin had set off with his suitcase of
cleaned and pressed clothes for the week. Every night he rang from Exeter or Aberdeen or wherever Suggs had sent him to sell paper. Every night he said the hotel was okay, nothing brilliant, but he
was going to get something to eat and then have a good night’s sleep. She’d never questioned it, she’d never had grounds to. And every Friday, when he got home, he’d given
her a measly sum of housekeeping money. There was never anything left over to bank. There was a freeze on wage increases, he’d said. And all the time he’d been sitting on his share of a
million pounds?